Friday, May 2, 2008

I'm no academic, but I do take my cross-disciplinary obsession in the fields of anthrozoology / anthropomorphism / neuroaesthetics seriously. Today, I was happy to learn from a real scholar that The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness by Donna Haraway is a book that's right up my alley. Off the bat, I like the couplet "companion species" a lot. It triggers many of the super-flammable juxtapositions that got me into these peculiar realms to begin with... OK, I know, I know... the glazed and shimmering Siegfried and Roy ain't no scholars either, and perhaps they threaten to undermine the validity of this post... In their defense, you must admit they've taken er, "significant otherness" to a whole other level.

This site is generally about our visceral, inexplicable, and sometimes ecstatic connection to animals and/or artistic representations of animals. It attempts to understand what animals mean to us both as living creatures and as powerful symbols that reach deep into our mind's eye and shape many aspects of our own consciousness.

Anthroporphism is something we seem biologically programed to do. As humans, we are prone to sentimentalize objects, ideas, and of course, animals to fit our perceptual, behavioral, and emotional apparatus. Since we can never fully comprehend the inner life of an animal, how shall we treat their "otherness" as we share life on Earth together? With respect to be certain. Still, we are left with our own skewed and humanized impressions, which manifest over and over in our culture - powerful reminders of our chosen "departure" from the nature and our animal cousins.